Retracing the steps of Borneo death march PoWs

One of the most brutal episodes of World War II, the Sandakan death march in Borneo, has been commemorated with a heritage trail retracing the last steps of hundreds of emaciated Allied prisoners of war.

A group of Australians will set off next week to tramp the route taken by the PoWs forced to trudge 250km into the jungle from Sandakan, a coastal town in the Malaysian state of Sabah, formerly British North Borneo.

The servicemen, shipped to Borneo after the fall of Singapore in 1942, were initially forced to build a military airfield. But in early 1945, facing the advance of Allied forces, the Japanese decided to move them west to the village of Ranau, near Mt Kinabalu, Southeast Asia's highest peak.

The route of the forced march, lost to the rainforest for 60 years, has been uncovered by Lynette Silver, an Australian military historian, and Tham Yau Kong, a Sabah tramping guide.

They found it with the help of a map drawn by an Australian military war graves photographer in 1946, and with charts which plotted the location of where each Allied prisoner died.

"This is the first time that anyone will have walked in the steps of the PoWs since Australian Army recovery teams were there in 1946," Silver said.

The 60-year-old historian will embark on a six-day, 150km section of the tramp next week with nine members of the Australian Army and Air Force, and the relative of a PoW.

The hope is that the Sandakan tramp will become as popular as the Kokoda Trail in the mountains of Papua New Guinea, along which Australian forces fought a series of desperate battles with the Japanese in 1942.

"I think it will attract adventurers who want a challenge, and relatives who want to retrace the steps of their grandfather or father," Silver said.

Many of the forced-march PoWs were malnourished and suffering diseases such as malaria and beri-beri.

Japanese soldiers were ordered to execute all those who faltered for fear they would later tell their story.

Those who made it to the end were later shot after Japanese commanders decided to cover up the atrocities of the march. Some were executed 12 days after the war had officially ended.

Of the 2434 British and Australian PoWs taken to Sandakan, only six escaped, all of them Australian. There were no British survivors.